Saturday, November 14, 2015

I saw the news scroll across the bottom of the television
screen that hung above my friends’ heads – for whatever reason, the restaurant
was playing the news in English. “100 hostages reported in Paris concert hall”
and “40 dead” and “Explosions throughout the city.”

The number of dead and injured kept climbing on the ticker
at the bottom of the screen – I couldn’t hear what the reporter was saying, but
she stood on a dark street and the people running behind her looked afraid.
After a few minutes, the channel changed to a soccer match and I turned back to
my friends’ conversation.

That could be it. That could be my entire connection to the
tragedy that is still unfolding. But it shook me, and I couldn’t get it out of
my head all last night, this morning.

“Pain is one of the
gifts God gives us.” From the back of my mind comes a lesson from my second or
third-grade science book. I remember the picture of a girl with her hand
outstretched, about to touch a hot stove. “Pain lets us know that there is a
problem so that we can fix it,” and she pulls her hand back. The second picture
shows her smiling, hand raised.

This morning I took a bus to a coffee shop so I could read
the news – 129 dead in Paris; 352 injured, 99 in critical condition. I read
friends’ posts that pointed out, rightly, that similar massacres occurred this
week: in Beirut where 43 were killed and 239 injured, and in Baghdad, where 26 were
killed and dozens injured.

I read posts criticizing the media for focusing on tragedies
in wealthy, Western nations while ignoring these tragedies elsewhere. I remembered again that while the media runs on a news
cycle, the world does not. Though I haven’t read about Syria in a few weeks,
refugees still flee for their lives from the atrocities that continue to happen
there. Somalian refugees still crowd into boats that cross the Mediterranean. Refugee
camps in Nepal still host families who have been left stateless for two decades
– the world has more or less forgotten them.

And why stop there? In Honduras more than a dozen people are
murdered every day. In the United States, mass shootings erupt often enough to
feel like a pattern. Around the world, violence and hatred against women and
ethnic and religious minorities form a slower and subtler massacre that doesn’t
prompt the same outpouring of support.

But compassion comes from a bottomless well. Praying for
France does not detract from anyone’s prayers for these other tragedies; on the contrary, prayers nearly always prompt more and greater prayers, more and greater action.

Anger
or judgment against those expressing pain, even if it's only changing a profile photo on Facebook, deadens our
own feelings, holds our own hand to the fire.

“They can’t feel
anything.” Now I remember the page in my Storybook Bible where Jesus heals the
men with leprosy. They were wrapped up in bandages, almost like Lazarus
stumbling out of the tomb a few pages later. “They have no feeling in their
body,” I remember my mother explaining, “So when their foot gets hurt they keep
walking on it and that makes the hurt worse. But then Jesus healed them and
made them feel again.”

This violence is terrifying. This violence is senseless, and
I use the word “senseless” as if any murder makes sense. These reports would be
easier to read if my senses were deadened. They would be easier to ignore. If
you feel nothing you can smile as your skin blisters, keep walking though every
step cripples you more.

As a global body, we should welcome the pain we feel, knowing it is a signal to react as quickly and decisively as the girl pulls her hand from the stove.

It is empathy, feeling others' pain, that should compel us to donate talents and time and money to counter hate and violence from our immediate neighborhoods all the way to our extremities on other parts of the globe. But more than that, it is love.

It takes a brave love to withstand this pain day after day, to resolve to not let ourselves become numb to it. We will be exhausted by this. There will be days where we think that we cannot continue.

But feeling, even pain, especially pain, is what it means to be healed.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

It’s the end of the month, so I’m going over my budget and
making sure everything is accounted for. Every purchase I’ve made all month is
meticulously recorded, receipts are duly labeled, photographed, and filed in a manila
folder. It’s tedious work. My spreadsheet rarely comes out right. I don’t like
doing this.

My friends, family, and church donated generously through
Mennonite Central Committee so that I could work here at the Association for a
More Just Society, and through MCC all my expenses are
paid – rent, food, transportation – as long as they’re all properly documented
in my Excel sheet. Sometimes I wonder, when I enter my daily fifty-cent bus
fare, whether this is all a little bit much.

But there is a reason for this sort of attentiveness,
however time-consuming. In fact, I’m becoming convinced that these are the
details that matter about an organization, that these records and audits and
due process, as unsexy as they might seem, are actively bringing about justice.

“Transparency” and “accountability” are the mantras here in
an organization that spends most of its time making sure that the government
works as it’s supposed to. It’s an
uphill battle. No one thinks that they’re a crook, especially not people who
have been unchallenged their whole lives. No one thinks they need the sort of accountability
that exhaustive documentation provides.

Certainly a few corrupt people exploit regulatory gaps to
steal millions of dollars or threaten others’ lives. But most people’s
corruption looks a lot more tame. It’s clocking in twenty minutes before you
actually start to work. It’s failing to get a signature. It’s signing off on
something you didn’t actually do, because you’ll get to it eventually.

It’s not that any of those minor infractions breaks a
system, but the culture it creates, the balance of risks and rewards it shifts,
starts to strain a system to its breaking point.

The Association for a More Just Society (AJS) is
Transparency International’s local chapter here, and last year signed a
landmark agreement with the Honduran government that charged them, as civil
society, with monitoring the transparency and anti-corruption efforts of major
government ministries.

That’s how I found myself from the first day elbows deep in
the Honduran Education System’s Purchasing and Contracts protocols. I
translated graphs of compliance percentages and documentation delivered and began
to realize why people say that the Devil’s in the details.

You can’t talk about justice on a big scale without talking
about justice on a small scale. You can’t talk about education reform without
making sure that it’s recorded whether your teachers actually show up to teach
their classes.

Take health – Honduras is one of the poorest countries in
Central America, and approximately 70% of its population depend on
publicly-funded hospitals for all their medical care. Yet too often they’re
sent home without desperately-needed medicine to treat illnesses from heart
disease to schizophrenia because the hospitals don’t have the necessary
medicines in stock. When I visited the hospital, doctors talked about buying
extra sutures with their own money for the times when the dispensary ran out
mid-surgery.

There are two ways to respond to this system that isn’t
working as it should. One could create supplemental medical brigades, donate medicines
from abroad and send foreign doctors, form health nonprofits or give
low-interests loans to purchase medicines on the private market. Or one could
go to the source, the Ministry of Health itself, and start to ask questions
about why it isn’t working like it
should.

Transformemos Honduras, a program of AJS, did the latter,
sending request after request for the sort of official documentation that would
help them see how medicine purchasing was being managed. Though Honduran law
says the information should be delivered within ten days, they waited six
months, during which time these justice fighters probably didn’t feel very much
like heroes.

When what documentation there was began to come together, it
told a bleak story. The Ministry of Health wasn’t analyzing the market to see
how much medicines should cost, and it wasn’t following the purchase contract
process in the way the law laid out. That meant it was paying double, triple,
even seven times as much for medicines as it should. What’s worse, the
companies themselves were involved in writing the purchase orders, telling the
Ministry of Health what medicines it should purchase instead of the other way
around.

The already-strained Ministry of Health was overpaying for
medicines that weren’t even necessarily the ones that were needed. Even worse, some
of these medicines were never delivered, while others were delivered in
unacceptable quality – after audits started, auditors found some medicines
infected with bacteria, while others were delivered with only four of their 11
essential ingredients.

The story gets even worse – the warehousing government
medicines was run by a woman who appeared to use the stash as her personal
piggybank, forging medicine orders and selling the excess, mismanaging the
disorganized warehouse so that expensive pills were left to spoil while people
in hospitals died for lack of drugs.

In 2013, Transformemos Honduras presented their report,
which was numbers and percentages and all the little pieces of methodology that
sometimes seem unimportant. The effect was electric. The Honduran government
immediately removed the director from her position. She, along with other wealthy, powerful
people would eventually face consequences -- caught in their corruption by a missing trail of paperwork.

It’s not always fun or exciting to sift through hundreds of
spreadsheets or file the government forms that will give you access to hundreds
more. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. We need to realize that
investment in “unsexy” work like social audits and performance reviews is
foundational to creating systems that serve the most vulnerable well, and that
transparency and accountability aren’t just buzzwords, they’re building blocks
to better systems.

Working at AJS, I’m empowered to be a part of civil
society’s oversight of government systems. But transparency and accountability
touch my own life as well. It matters that I account for the money I spend,
that I’m willing to be as open with my use of others’ funds as I want the
government to be with their’s.

So I stare at the expense column in front of me. I write my
daily 50 cents under the appropriate column in my expense spreadsheet, hit save, and then hit send.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

I used to recycle religiously. My environmental-scientist
roommate helped me learn how to twist off caps, tear off labels, and flatten
plastic cartons. We kept our recycling in a big wicker basket, and every other
week we would empty the paper and bottles into a bin and drag it to the curb to
be picked up, trucked off, sorted, and crushed – remade.

I don’t do that anymore. I throw plastic bottles in with
cardboard in with banana peels almost like I don’t believe that the damage we
are doing to our planet is irreversible. It’s not that I don’t believe in
recycling and not that I don’t want to do it – but the systems that are in
place around me simply aren’t set up in a way that makes it possible.

The fact is that recycling as I thought of it in Michigan
doesn’t really exist in Honduras. There are no wicker baskets, and definitely
no curb-side bins. Instead, at the end of the week, my host dad will drive our
bags of trash to the single dumpster that serves our entire hillside community.

For people who don’t have a vehicle and can’t make the walk
down the steep hill with their bags of trash, the street has to do. Throwing
garbage in the streets is not a good thing – but for many it’s the only real
option. Throwing things away, let alone recycling, isn’t a moral decision, it’s
a practical one.

It’s impossible to understand individual behavior without understanding the systems that provoke it, the balance of costs and benefits that always lead people to consider or decline actions.

In the United States, I didn’t recycle because I was a
better person than the people who live here in Honduras – I recycled because it
was easy, because single-stream recycling and curb-side pick-up tipped the
balance of costs and benefits so far towards recycling that one would have to
be actively against recycling not to do it.

I could judge Hondurans for not making the same decisions I
used to make in the United States – but that would be ignoring the fact that
our decisions aren’t actually the same at all.

I don’t recycle here because I can’t recycle here. Because
of the lack of any recycling system, because of the way that materials are
reused in different ways, no one would blame me. As I realized this, I started
to think about other systems, how decisions I think people should be making may
not actually be a meaningful option for them.

II.

In Honduras, about 4% of murders result in an arrest,
leaving an astonishing 96% impunity rate for homicides. Victims of crimes don’t
always report them to the police, witnesses of crimes don’t testify, and
dangerous criminals are left on the street.

The answer to this seems obvious – people should report
crimes, lawyers should prosecute them, and judges should punish them. Yet
Honduras’s justice system is riddled with roadblocks and dangers that generally
mean involvement carries a much higher cost than benefit.

How could I tell people here that they need to cooperate
with the justice system when doing so means risking death threats for
themselves and their families? Witnesses have been shot for cooperating, their
names revealed by corrupt police officers. Lawyers have been assassinated for
standing up to the wrong people. Bribes and rampant bias mean that the wealthy
and powerful are far less likely to be charged with a crime, let alone
convicted of it, while the poor have none of these protections.

The fact that Hondurans don’t often bring cases to be
prosecuted is not a problem of apathy, of laziness, or of disinterest – it is a
structural problem that keeps everyone from equal access to justice. The
balance of costs and benefits is warped – the choice to trust a broken system
isn’t a meaningful choice.

It works the other way too – the costs of standing up
against corruption are high, but the costs of corruption itself might be quite
low. Without justice systems that regularly prosecute corruption, the scales
are tipped again, leading people who in other situations would follow the rules
to decide the benefits of crime are too attractive to ignore.

Context matters. Attaching moral significance to systemic
failures too often blames the most vulnerable for their own problems. In the
United States, it’s easy to feel moral superiority for doing things –
recycling, eating organic, getting a college education, even trusting police
officers – that simply aren’t meaningful choices for others.

These decisions aren’t always up to individuals. If we
believe that eating organic is important, we need to do more than tell people to
do so, we need to invest in making this food cheaper and more accessible. Valuing
higher education means changing patterns of costs and benefits so that it’s a
real option for students regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic
background. Increasing trust in police means ensuring that their interactions
with people of all backgrounds are equally above reproach.

People aren’t always going to make the same decisions as me.
Sometimes this is because they disagree with me – they don’t think recycling is
important, they’re attracted by the corruption’s apparent benefits. But more
often than I realize, there is no real decision for them to make.

I don’t want to say that what is good or what is right should
be easy. But what is good should be possible, and it should be possible for
everyone. Individual choices matter, but what matters more is the existence of
choice in the first place.

That is part of why I get so excited about the work we do
here. It is more than throwing a single can in a recycling bin. It is more than
throwing a single person in prison. It is a fundamental readjustment of entire
systems of benefits and costs, making it easier to do what is good and harder
to break the rules – giving everyone the real opportunity to make choices that are better for them and better for our world..